Now that we have the waitresses loving us again...

I don't want us to get caught up in the issue of how we are at restaurants, that wasn't really the point. (Although it is a simple thing to change!) What the point was and hopefully is how do we live our lives. "By faith" is how. But what does that mean. What is the difference between living by faith and living by knowledge. Many of us spend a lot of time learning about being a christian. If we start doing what we have been reading about we should at this point in Christiandum we should be purpose-driven, wild at heart, romancing the heck out of the sacred and our spouses, keeping promises, asking what would Jesus do, emerging as a new kind of christian, not being left behind, knowing what orthodoxy is and being generous with it, listening to blue jazz, drinking pura vida coffee, telling our stories. But we aren't. We aren't. We read, we talk, but we don't do anything different after we have read a book. We are a culture based on what the culture tells us we are rather than doing what we know to be right. We do not live out that which we know to be true because I don't think we have faith in what is true anymore. Many know the vocabulary, but they don't know the heart or the voice.

If you are in some kind of leadership role where you have influence into someone else's life what would your goals be for this year? How did you arrive at that goal? Does it seem like the right thing to do or is it what you are hearing God telling you to do it? If we step out because we think we are hearing God's heart for us then we are walking in faith. Are we just going to continue doing the same old and know that it didn't work the past five books we read so we should read the next hottest thing that someone is getting paid a lot of money to come up with this one because his or her last two book people bought and people will usually buy the next two if the first one is any good but the next one is usually not as good as the first but we still buy it anyway because he is a nationally known writer and is very successful so he must be a tool of God or at least by Zondervan.

I am hearing God say, "come to Me like you did when you first fell in love with Me... Come with a broken and repentant heart and worship Me in spirit and truth." I am going to ask more questions, as I did in the beginning. I want to come with an expectancy of awe instead of a callous and jaundice agenda of out-do Yourself than what I have experienced in the past. I want to come humbly and worship with what I know to be true rather than what the latest praise song is telling me to say, I want to bow my head for a while and listen instead of having an opinion to give Him about the way things are going. I need to sit next to someone I don't know but don't like and listen to their story. I going to quit pretending...